Sunday, April 26, 2009

On Friday Heather and I couldn't figure out what to make for dinner, so instead we walked down Queen E looking at menus for something that appealed to us. Saw that Pulp Kitchen is closed. There's a sign that a restaurant called Lady Marmalade is opening up soon.

We ended up at Prohibition, which was pretty busy (we even had to wait for a table!) The place is definitely growing on me. For the first time that I've been there, they weren't out of Sapporo on tap. (I think that's why I was iffy in the past -- I don't like any of the other beers they have). There's a nice atmosphere in the place. We passed by The Roy on the way over. There's something about The Roy that we couldn't put our finger on that we just didn't like. Maybe it was the bright lights or carpetting or lack of music. In any case, it looks like I've had a pub (Prohibition) all along and just didn't know it.

Well I'm off to make dinner. We're having t-bone steaks (on sale at Loblaws, only $5 per steak!) with grilled vegetables and baked potato. Mmmm.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

I've almost finished the pew. This weekend I completed the sanding, patched up a few holes & glued on a couple chips that came off when I took it apart. I'm not using all of the original pew, so I sanded down a leftover piece and took it to Home Depot where they applied sample stains, so that we could see how they looked on the actual wood in the house under different light conditions. Decided on Dark Walnut for the bench, and Jacobean for the headboard on the bed. I stained all of the headboard, and most of the bench, while it was still in separate pieces. I've left the outside sides of the bench unstained until after it's put together, so that I can fill in the holes for the screws that will hold the bench together.

Watched the Masters in between working on the bench and cleaning the house. I thought Tiger Woods didn't have a chance and then suddenly on 16 he was one shot out of the lead, before he bogeyed 17 and 18. I guess it didn't matter with the leaders coming in at -12.

My parents came over for Easter dinner today. We had lamb, with a bottle of wine from Scott (a 2004 Stratus cabernet sauvignon), which went really well. My mom made cake for dessert, which we pretty much finished.

Spring season for sports starts up again this week, with Ultimate on Monday. It's outside at BMO, and I don't think it's going to be too warm.

I finally connected the Airport Extreme as our wireless router. It's much faster than the Airport Express, at least on my Mac. I still need to hook up the Netgear router as a wireless access point in the office, and then Heather should see faster speeds too. I wonder if we've been paying for ultra fast high speed (or whatever Rogers calls it) all this time, and then not been able to access it because our router couldn't handle the speed. At least now the router's not the bottleneck.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

This past weekend (back when it was spring-like outside) I worked on the church pew. Here's a before-and-after:

I took a small piece (that had chipped off when I took the pew apart) to the friendly folks at Home Depot. They suggested that I could probably remove the varnish with just sandpaper. I was a bit disappointed at first, because from googling I thought I'd be using chemicals with fancy names like methylene chloride and trisodium phosphate, while wearing neoprene gloves. But instead I returned home with a $1.29 sanding block.

The sanding block worked well on the curved parts of the pew, but it would have taken a lot of elbow grease to remove the varnish from the large flat surfaces. So I bought a Ryobi 1/4 sheet pad sander, on sale for $30 at Home Depot. It was the best $30 I've spent on power tools in a while. (Is there ever a bad way to spend money on power tools?)

I sanded the 5' piece which will become the headboard on our bed, and about 90% of the bench. It was getting late (and cold) on Sunday evening so I called it a day. I'll complete the sanding on Friday and then maybe stain on Saturday. There's all sorts of opinions on the web on how to stain oak. I think I'll ask the Home Depot folks again.

This past Tuesday we went up north to Yonge and Eglinton to buy a stationary bike from Fitness Depot. It's one the exercises Heather can do without harming her back. They delivered it last week, and it's now nicely set up in the basement.

On Thursday we had a playoff game in hockey. We needed to win (a tie was no good) to move on. We actually scored the first goal, but then were down 3-1 with a couple minutes remaining. We pulled the goalie (needing to score three goals to move on) and they scored a couple empty-nets to make the score look a bit lopsided. So we're done for winter. It was one of the more fun seasons in recent Rocket history; we started passing the puck around and scored more than a goal a game. Summer hockey starts up in a couple weeks.

I was out with a vendor tonight for dinner. I had suggested either Nota Bene or Biff's (to give a more traditional option). We ended up at Biff's, which was also a convenient walk from One Yonge. It was okay; the reviews on chowhound.com sounded better. The wine was pretty good.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Heather was telling me about a quote from Jane Jacobs that she may use in her dissertation "this is both a gloomy and a hopeful book". I suggested a working title for her dissertation: A Tale of Three Cities. I don't think Heather will go for it.

(for those not familiar with Heather's dissertation, she is comparing the driving forces behind the new deal for cities in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Toronto)